KDE completely broken

Hello everyone,

I’m dualbooting openSUSE 13.2 and Win 8.1 on my laptop. I installed openSUSE fresh a few days ago, everything worked perfectly except I couldn’t figure out how to get the picture to an external monitor. However, today I first booted into Win 8.1 and this still works without a problem. After a while I wanted to switch to openSUSE, so I rebooted into it. Instead of seeing the same KDE I shut down yesterday, it now looks like Win 3.11 or something from the 90s. All the widgets are gone, I can’t access KDE settings, I can’t access the networkmanager, I have no internet connection, it even resets my keyboard layout with every reboot.

The last things I did was switching from bumblebee nouveau to bumblebee nvidia, that worked without a problem. Then I also changed the grub2 config so that it remembers the last cursor position. It also worked.

So I don’t have a clue what happened. Started openSUSE today and suddenly nothing works anymore.

Anyone a clue where I should start looking?

My laptop:
Some i7
8GB RAM
Samsung 850 Evo
GTX 870m

Greetings,
Kocha

On 2015-05-01 02:36, Kocha wrote:
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> I’m dualbooting openSUSE 13.2 and Win 8.1 on my laptop. I installed
> openSUSE fresh a few days ago, everything worked perfectly except I
> couldn’t figure out how to get the picture to an external monitor.
> However, today I first booted into Win 8.1 and this still works without
> a problem. After a while I wanted to switch to openSUSE, so I rebooted
> into it. Instead of seeing the same KDE I shut down yesterday, it now
> looks like Win 3.11 or something from the 90s. All the widgets are gone,
> I can’t access KDE settings, I can’t access the networkmanager, I have
> no internet connection, it even resets my keyboard layout with every
> reboot.

That sounds like you are booting to failsafe mode.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.

(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Minas Tirith))

That shouldn’t be the case. I use the same menu option as always. I also just checked the bootloader parameters and they don’t look suspicious. I don’t understand grub completely, though.

A pure hunch:

Try removing “/boot/grub2/grubenv” (requires root), and see if that changes anything.

Nope, didn’t help. And now I’m getting an error message whenever I select an OS in grub.

On 2015-05-01 03:16, Kocha wrote:
>
> robin_listas;2707649 Wrote:
>> On 2015-05-01 02:36, Kocha wrote:
>>
>> That sounds like you are booting to failsafe mode.

> That shouldn’t be the case. I use the same menu option as always. I also
> just checked the bootloader parameters and they don’t look suspicious. I
> don’t understand grub completely, though.

You can check if grub triggered it by this command:


journalctl --no-pager | grep "Command line"

One of the options given to the kernel tells X to switch to safemode. I
don’t remember the exact spelling, but I’d recognize it if I see it.
X11failsafe perhaps.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.

(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Minas Tirith))

That’s safe to ignore. Some folk have run into problems with “grubenv” when using “btrfs”.

It actually sounds like you were not booting to KDE but rather IceWM

Please also make sure windows 8 is actually, really powered off!
If you don’t know what I’m on about, then it likely isn’t.

IceWM is a low resource desktop UI and it may have been selected by accident at login or your system fell back to that if KDE failed to load.
At the login window, check that KDE is your selected desktop

I wondered about that.

Worse, he may be set for automatic login.

If that’s the case, then:

  1. logout;
  2. login, but select KDE plasma desktop from the login screen settings

If you don’t know how to logout, then CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE twice will force it.

That was it! I had auto login on and it booted into IceWM. Now I just wonder, why it switched to IceWM all of a sudden.

It remembers what desktop you last used, and that becomes the default. It stores that default in “.dmrc”.

I never logged into IceWM, though. Always stayed with KDE. I wouldn’t even remember that I ever had a crash. And “systemctl --state=failed” returns 0 results. I just upgraded my laptop with an SSD, that’s why I have a fresh install of openSUSE. Previously I had Arch Linux with Gnome installed, so KDE is pretty new to me. And the bootup sequence is pretty fast with an SSD, so I may not have noticed failures there. But from what my eye could catch, I didn’t notice any irregularities.

None of us knows for sure what happened.

The important part is that you now know how to fix it if that ever happens again.

Ok, awesome. Thanks for your help!